Wednesday, October 24, 2007

To be honest....
I am not an expert in ambigrams....i just know what they are....

I found them to be interesting enough....to make a post out of them...

Ambigrams are infact more interesting than anagrams....

Now,What is an ambigram? An ambigram is a graphical figure that spells out a word not only in its form as presented, but also in another direction or orientation. The text can also consist of a few words, and the the text spelled out in the other direction or orientation is often the same, but can also be a different text.

There are many type of ambigrams.Of which i have listed out few.....

1.Rotational
A design that presents several instances of words when rotated through a fixed angle. This is usually 180 degrees, but rotational ambigrams of other angles exist, for example 90 or 45 degrees. The word spelled out from the alternative direction(s) is often the same, but may be a different word to the initially presented form. A simple example is the lower-case abbreviation for "Down", dn, which looks like the lower-case word up when rotated 180 degrees.


2.Mirror
A design that can be read when reflected in a mirror, usually as the same word or phrase both ways. Ambigrams that form different words when viewed in the mirror are also known as glass door ambigrams, because they can be printed on a glass door to be read differently when entering or exiting.



3.Figure-ground
A design in which the spaces between the letters of one word form another word



5.Fractal
A version of space-filling ambigrams where the tiled word branches from itself and then shrinks in a self-similar manner, forming a fractal. See fractal of the word TREE as an animated example.



6.3-dimensional
A design where an object is presented that will appear to read several letters or words when viewed from different angles.



7.Perceptual shift
A design with no symmetry but can be read as two different words depending on how the curves of the letters are interpreted.



8.Natural
A natural ambigram is a word that possesses one or more of the above symmetries when written in its natural state, requiring no typographic styling. For example, the words "dollop" and "suns" are natural rotational ambigrams. The word "bud" forms a natural mirror ambigram when reflected over a vertical axis. The words "CHOICE" and "OXIDE", in all capitals, form a natural mirror ambigram when reflected over a horizontal axis. The word "TOOTH", in all capitals, forms a natural mirror ambigram when its letters are stacked vertically and reflected over a vertical axis.


This is an ambigram in Dan Brown's novel Angels and demons designed by John Langdon

After this book's publication,awareness on ambigrams has increased.

Hope you find the ambigrams as interesting as I found them...

But beware!!!!once you start designing anagrams you become addicted to them.....

8 comments:

surya said...

nice article dude....can u just write a C program to generate ambigram for any type of string input? lol

Deepak said...

Mission impossible -IV

Aravind said...

ambigrams are always cool... You can make them with no hard work.. In fact i did my first ever ambigram (my name, which is the one of the most difficult ones i have ever made) in 20 mins during engg mechanics class!!!

kristian said...

yeah..ambigrams are really cool..
it caught my attention once and started creating some but i soon lost my interest when i found my works pretty not nice..

but i got it back, fortunately, when i had read Brown's Angels and Demons..
hehe..

elias said...

deepak,

actually...mission not impossible... check out flipscript.com

Deepak said...

i have tried
it is not possible for a software to make it for all words! it works fine... but not great!

Anonymous said...

Hey... Isn't Figure-ground meant to be the spaces between the words make the words like this?
http://www.johnlangdon.net/figureground/meyou.jpg
I'm pretty sure that's a Figure-ground ambigram...

Deepak said...

@anonymous

Bingo!!! Its been nearly 2 and a half years since that post!

Yes you are right... I misunderstood the definition. It was a mistake from my side!

Thanks for pointing it out..

It has been corrected with the right image!